Hip-hop isn’t dead. It’s just changing at a wider scale and quicker pace than can be comprehensible to a listener that isn’t readily paying attention to its evolution. R&B’s Golden Era bridged the 90’s into the early 00’s, but a renaissance in Neo-Soul with a tinge for retro-futurism has reignited a modern scene that may very well come to be every bit as influential as its predecessor. And jazz is also alive and well. If it weren’t, and if in fact hip-hop, R&B, and Neo-Soul weren’t either - Dinner Party wouldn’t be crafting the groove-stricken, funk-loving, soulful improvisation, composition, and collaboration that it is with what is now its third project, Enigmatic Society.

 

For those new to the super group, you’re probably not. More likely, you’re just unaware of their name, and have at the very least come across one of their hit tracks, like Freeze Tag featuring frequent collaborator, Phoelix. You should know their names as individuals - Robert Glasper, Terrace Martin, 9th Wonder, and Kamasi Washington - which together represent what has to be the most wide-ranging collection of producers, composers, instrumentalists, and all-around artists to have influenced the wider and seemingly entire musical sphere over the course of the last decade and more. All have solo work that proves hip-hop, R&B, Neo-Soul, and in particular jazz aren’t only still alive, but instead at a modernistic, experimental zenith, where a majority of its presence is felt in the mainstream by proxy of the other musical spectrums it informs. But that isn’t new. The great jazz artists, multi-instrumentalists, and modern composers in pursuit of their own craft have always been underrated by a general population, being instead borrowed - acknowledged or not - by so many other artists exploring so many other sonic spaces, that their work is omnipresent nonetheless.

 

But this is new: that together, Dinner Party, represent a re-centralization of recognition within improvisational composition - within jazz - where their acknowledged presence in all of music isn’t only welcomed, but sought after by so many featuring artists across so many musical spaces. It all started in 2020 with their debut self-titled project. Starring the previously mentioned Freeze Tag, the project was a stay-at-home era - and more importantly, a Black Lives Matter Marches era - reprieve from the trauma and uncertainty in favor of some free-wielding, love-infused, positivity-inspiring tunes. Groovy, funky, soulful, jazzy, and ultimately uplifting, Dinner Party stands still perhaps strongest as an exploration of collaborative force extending beyond the quartet at its hearth, and into a wider-reaching link with a featuring artist. In their debut’s case, Dinner Party was more or less a quintet, weaving Chicago artist and producer, Phoelix into more than half the tracks.

 

When the project’s cut of remixes came out a few months later, inviting a longer, wider-reaching list of friends into the frame, Dinner Party’s blueprint was cemented. Their identity as a collaborative, instrumental force - a band, more or less, with far more solo gravitas, critical acclaim, and general success than any other group - and where their high-flying musical friends - some vocalists or rappers, others producers or instrumentalists - join in on given tracks to build out intrigue and uniqueness throughout the length of a project. Buddy, Rueben Vincent, Phoelix, Malaya, Tarriona Tank Ball, Punch, Bilal, Herbie Hancock, Rapsody, Cordae, Snoop Dogg, and Alex Isley made Dinner Party: Dessert an unparalleled experiment in collaboration - pushing the boundaries of all those musical scenes still very much alive; still very much in search of new, experimental risks.